Networks are rapidly becoming overloaded and taxed with traffic from governments, organizations, and private individuals. In particular, the Internet is increasingly being used to conduct business, acquire information, and for leisure. Moreover, there have been recent governmental efforts made to ensure all participants within the United States have affordable access to high speed connectivity to the Internet. However, if every participant were to have a high speed connection to the Internet, then websites will become even more overtaxed and not be capable of supporting the increased speed with which transactions are received and processed.
As a result, organizations and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have began selling high-end services, such as Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to customers. A VPN ensures a dedicated port for traffic over a network for participants of the VPN, where traffic over that port is custom encrypted based on the participants to that VPN. The encryption provides an added enticement to customers, because it adds security aspects to transactions over the VPN. However, because ports are finite resources only so many VPNs can be realistically available. Moreover, the VPN encryption requires applications which must be supported on the client devices of the participants.
With the introduction of VPN and similar services, the Internet is rapidly becoming segmented into fast and secure networks for those that can afford it and legacy (slower) and insecure networks for those that cannot afford it. Furthermore, if VPNs are excessively deployed the Internet may begin to logically resemble a finite collection of dedicated networks, where fees are required to traverse across each separate dedicated network. This may actually hinder the true purpose of the Internet, which was to provide pervasive connectivity to services and information in an uninhibited manner. If tolls are required to proceed at various points of the Internet, then usage of the Internet will be severely inhibited.
Another problem, which has only strengthened the movement towards VPN solutions, is the increased threat of malicious inference with Internet traffic. That is, a network transaction may include sensitive information which can be maliciously grabbed or may be tainted with a virus that may damage resources that process the transaction. In fact, this problem has become so pervasive that governments, organizations, and individuals have invested heavily in devices and software to detect and prevent such behavior.
Even without VPNs, the Internet is rapidly becoming congested and there is a need for new private and privileged networks existing as sub-networks within the Internet. Such privileged networks would provide enhanced network service to organizations for effectively continuing to do business over the Internet by offering privileged routes over the Internet, which are reserved for selective subscribers. Therefore, there is a need for improved network transactions which offer alternatives to traditional VPN and related technologies and which provide privilege networks.